Steal Across the Sky (36 page)

“Cam!”

She looked up. Frank pointed over her shoulder, swinging his arm so wildly, in such an un-Frank-like way, that he lost his balance and fell. Cam almost lost hers as she spun to face the direction he pointed: at the Dome.

A section of it had opened, and an Atoner walked toward them.

Gramma

 

If you can see this frum the sekund rode then draw one mor flowar so I no.

 

thank you.

 

Your frend

 

Hannah

LUCCA HEARD THE SHOT
, grabbed Soledad, and hit the dirty floor of the hallway. Nothing to roll behind, nowhere to hide her . . .
cazzo
. He shielded Soledad’s body with his own and groped for his Beretta.

Another rapid string of shots. He was hit, his leg, it burned as if acid had been thrown on it. . . . He got the Beretta free and raised his head—who the hell to shoot at? The hallway was full of people, all of them screaming. A body fell beside him, spurting blood but still firing a semi-automatic, the bullet explosions so loud it deafened him to all other sound. Some of the flying blood hit Lucca’s eyes, obscuring his vision. He swiped it away and again tried to see whom to aim at. Then he was pushed so hard that his injured leg sent fire directly into his brain, pain so intense that for a moment he barely noticed that the Beretta had been snatched from his hand. It fired inches from his head, the explosion of sound adding to the agony in his leg to create a red cloud that he could actually see, so that nothing else was visible but that crimson haze, like the finest of blood droplets shrieking and dancing in the air. . . .

Then his mind cleared, the pain became bearable, and he was looking up at Soledad, on her feet and holding Lucca’s gun in the perfect two-handed stance he had taught her behind the mountain cabin.

“Drop the gun, Soledad. Now,” said a voice rigid with forced calm. Lucca knew that voice, had heard it . . . His mind fumbled and he tried to turn his head, but the slight movement again sent pain racing along his nerves. But he knew the voice; he had heard it often enough on surveillance recordings. Diane Lovett, from the American Agency.

Lucca’s Beretta crashed to the floor. He reached for it, but Diane said, “No, Lucca,” and he let it lie. Blood poured from his thigh, but despite
that, his vision abruptly expanded, as if a zoom lens had suddenly snapped on, and every detail of the hallway became preternaturally clear.

A man lying dead beside him, eyes staring sightlessly at the L-shaped crack in the ceiling, a small red-rimmed hole from Lucca’s gun just above the bridge of his nose.

Soledad lurching over the body to kneel beside James, whose naked body had been so torn by bullets that it looked like the ground veal of Lucca’s cook.

Diane Lovett lowering her gun, walking toward him, picking up the Beretta with two delicate fingers, glancing sharply at Lucca.

All the other people, each limned so clearly in Lucca’s mind that he could have identified them even years later: the three other agents, the fat woman in the orange skirt who was still screaming, the peering boy clothed in rags and curiosity, the man with dark curly hair and full beard holding an unfired shotgun and looking uncertain whether any of the others threatened his home and, if so, whom he should shoot.

And the pregnant Kularian girl, unhurt because she wore the Atoner personal shield off which most of those bullets had ricocheted, and shouting at an empty patch of air beside the dead man’s body, just at head height for a standing man, words Lucca had not heard in nearly a year and didn’t expect to hear ever again:
“Kla shulathewithoz, beenitu kla!”

Not the second road! Not now!

Diane Lovett stepped over him to go to Soledad. Another agent reached under the body beside Lucca, pulled the dead man’s wallet from his pocket, and tore it open. Into his handheld he rasped, “Who the fuck is ‘Carl Lewis’? . . . Well, run it now, damn it!” In the distance sirens began to scream. Lucca strained to hear over the noise—the fat woman had never stopped screaming nor the Kularian girl shouting—but there was no sound from Soledad.

Lucca closed his eyes and gave himself to pain.

THE ATONER WAS
SMALL
. That was Cam’s first thought:
Our whole species was changed by something so small and fat!
Then she realized that maybe this wasn’t an Atoner at all, just a machine or a holo or something that humans hadn’t yet invented and couldn’t imagine. It must not be a real Atoner because it didn’t wear a space suit. It walked naked and alive on the dead surface of the moon.

Maybe a yard high, with soft, faintly green skin that looked pasty and loose. Two fat legs and four, five, six arms . . . but they weren’t arms, they were vacuum hose–like things that each ended in four fingers. A head shaped like a funnel with the open top full of some writhy stuff like black worms, two eyes, a mouth but no nose . . . The fearsome Atoner, shaper of human destiny, looked like a seasick Pillsbury Doughboy on a bad hair day.

“Hello, Cam. Hello, Frank,” it said, and it was the voice of Cam’s first interview, of the recordings of NASA and UN radio speeches, of Soledad’s tape on the shuttle in orbit over Kular the day Aveo died. “Give it to me, please.”

“No,” Frank said.

“Give it to me, please.”

Frank ran, leaping in clumsy bounds away from and around the curve of the Dome, toward the rover. He ran, and then all at once he stopped running, so suddenly that his top half swayed back and forth, like a tree in a gale. Cam tried to lift her foot, and couldn’t. She, too, was rooted to the ground. It was the same rooting her personal shield had done on Kular, only not under her control. Or Frank’s.

The Atoner, or Atoner-thing, waddled to Frank. Frank’s whole body stood motionless—at least Cam could move the top half of hers—but
the little alien effortlessly lifted Frank’s gloved hand and removed the yellow packet.

“I’m sorry,” it said in that same incongruously deep, creepily polite voice, “but you cannot have this. We watch Earth, you know. You cannot have this.” The Atoner waddled to the Dome. A section of the opaque gray wall slid open, revealing swirling gray fog. The alien went inside, the door closed, and Cam’s body was released from the shield.

“You fuckers!” she screamed. Red mist settled over her brain—she could
feel
it, burning and stinging like a million flying fire ants. “How dare you, how could you, you—”

“Cam!” Frank called, but she barely heard him. It all rushed over her, then—all the
trying
so fucking hard, trying on Kular and trying on Earth with all those lecture performances and trying on the moon, trying and trying and trying to get it right and every fucking time sabotaged by aliens who did—who didn’t— All the men she’d killed— Aveo—

“You could have helped us!” she cried at the solid Dome. “You could have been our mentors, our . . . our interpreters, our fucking guardians! Your race could have helped ours to handle the new genes again, could have shown us the right road. . . . You could have been our big brothers!”

Rushing over to the Dome, she beat on it with her gloved fists, sobbing and crying out, not even knowing what she said. “Brothers! Yeah, you were our brothers, all right—like Cain to Abel! You robbed us and then you kidnapped us and then you show up promising atonement and when there is no fucking atonement, all you do is rob us again— Those genes are ours, do you hear me, you bastards? Ours! Ours!”

“Cam!” said Frank, pulling at her, trying to put the bulky inflated arms of the EVA suit around her.

“—
ours
, and you could have been our guides, our guardians, you could have shown us how to play kulith better— What was it? Jealousy? Can we go on after death and you can’t so you took that knowledge away from us, was that it—”

“We have to go, Cam. Air will run out. Cam—”

“You could have been our bridge to the next stage for our entire race!”

She let him lead her, still sobbing, back to the rover. In the air lock she collapsed against the wall. Frank stood close to her. As soon as
possible—too soon, the air lock wasn’t fully pressurized—he pulled off his helmet. Then hers, and he stood even closer and put his mouth against her ear. With one hand he unsealed one of the pockets on his suit, shielding the action with both their bodies, the whole thing at double speed. He forced her head to look down, whispered to her, and resealed the pocket.

Then it was over.

Dazed, she heard the inner air-lock door slide open. Terry and Jane weren’t untied after all. But Terry had somehow gotten his boot off and lay on the floor, hands tied to the bench post where Frank had left him, one foot propped up on the console with his big toe on the radio key. He was talking, yelling, but Cam wasn’t listening.

What Frank had shown her in his pocket was a duplicate dusty, filmy yellow cloth packet.

What he said in her ear was, “Evidence tampering isn’t always a crime.”

NUMB, SOLEDAD KNELT OVER JAMES
. The thing below her barely looked like James. Most of his face had been shot away. His bright blond hair matted with blood, still flowing . . . how could a person have so much blood? She laid a hand on his left thigh, one of the few patches of skin not torn or bloody, a glistening expanse of smooth, pale flesh over hard muscles, warm and wet.

Wet, but not with blood. James had been in the shower. That was why he was naked. He’d been in the shower and he’d bolted out when he heard the girl answer the door because he didn’t know if she really understood how dangerous that was in this place, or if she was wearing her personal shield . . . as he was not. You didn’t wear a shield in the shower, how could you get clean . . . they were expecting a pizza, such an ordinary thing, but the bell rang too soon and James heard it and knew . . .

“Soledad.” Very gentle. Soledad went on resting her hand on James’s warm thigh.

“Soledad.” Diane’s hand on her elbow, guiding her, and Soledad rose. She dropped the blue cashmere sweater over James, as if to keep warmth in the body losing all warmth.

“Lucca?” The word hurt, as if it traveled up her throat with stingers unfurled.

“Shot, but I don’t think it’s serious. A ricochet bullet. Soledad, who is Carl Lewis?”

Soledad looked, then, at the man she’d killed. He had been spraying bullets around the hallway like a gardener hosing plants. . . . No, that wasn’t right. Her mind wasn’t working right. Something was wrong with her memory. Carl Lewis had been firing at . . . at the girl. Yes. The girl
wearing her personal shield because the Earth
was
a dangerous place and the Atoners wanted to protect her unborn baby. And James had not been wearing his shield because he’d been in the shower—

Soledad squatted beside Lucca. His face contorted with pain, but he opened his eyes. “I’m sorry,
cara
.”

“Did you know? About . . . her? Anything at all?”

His eyes went wide and she believed him. “No, I didn’t know. I would not have . . . have brought you if . . .”

“Easy, buddy,” said a medic who had somehow appeared, and Soledad was pushed aside. She straightened and found herself staring into the eyes of the pregnant child-woman from another planet. The girl was crying.

“Did you love him?” Soledad asked. “Or was he just the stud that the Atoners chose to get the DNA back into the human genome?” But the English words must have been too sophisticated for her; uncomprehending, she turned away.

Diane said to Soledad, “We have to get you out of here before anyone arrives. All of you.”

“I’m going with Lucca. Is an ambulance—”

“Agency chopper. Come!”

Soledad heard the chopper then, although she couldn’t imagine where it could possibly land. The girl—where was she from? Kular? Susban? Londu?—had begun shouting again in her own language. Soledad walked by Lucca’s stretcher, reaching for his hand. He squeezed her fingers. She kept her gaze on him as Diane hustled them from the lobby, only looking back once to see if, somehow, an Atoner had appeared on the scene to witness firsthand the havoc its race had brought on hers. But, of course, there was no Atoner in the grimy Brooklyn hallway. They didn’t witness in person on any human planet; it was far too dangerous down there among the savages.

CHIEF OF STAFF WALTER STEINHAUER
(
WS
):
“Ma’am, this—

PRESIDENT:
My God, Walter, what is it? You look like—

WS:
This just came from Selene City. . . . They have . . . a Farrington Tours rover. . . . You better read it.